They'd all used UserTesting to collect data and feedback for various projects, and didn't like the experience.

The ideas were all over the place - Hiremath had some big plan for getting into the hotel space, and Thomas still thinks about an idea he had for minimizing food waste - but the one that stuck out to all three was Khan's thought that maybe they could do something about user testing. Loom's founders in the early days: (from left to right) Shahed Khan, Joe Thomas and Vinay Hiremath Photo: LoomĮach was tasked with bringing some product ideas, which they wrote out on a whiteboard before talking through each one. Thomas was trained as a product manager, Khan as a designer, Hiremath as an engineer among them, they figured they could get something off the ground. One Sunday in 2015, after a night of commiserating about their respective jobs, the three decided to see if they could build something together. The three had all moved from the Chicago area to California - 'We grew up in like a 20-mile radius of each other,' Thomas said, though they didn't meet until they got to California - and became close friends. Thomas, Hiremath and Khan knew they wanted to build something together before they knew what they wanted to build. All that success, if you boil it all the way down, seems to come down to one thing: Loom made video easy. In the process, they've helped Loom become a billion-dollar company, a noun - you don't 'make a Loom video,' you either 'record a loom' or you just loom - and a key part of the future of work for companies around the world. They're looking for new ways to communicate that are just as rich and not as reliant on overlapping calendars. As they settle into new ways of working, they're increasingly finding that while video may be the future, video meetings may not be.

In the early days of the pandemic, employees everywhere were forced to get used to virtual meetings on Zoom and Teams. 'People feel like we're sitting down, having breakfast and talking together.' Even after doing them for a while, Burke said she can't believe how many people actually watch her videos. 'Now, half the time I film it in a sweatshirt and sweatpants at my kitchen table,' she said. At first she treated it like a presentation, and carefully chose her words and setting. It's better than a meeting, she said, because it doesn't require everyone to be paying attention at the exact same moment. 'Sometimes it's updates, sometimes it's shoutouts, sometimes I do a deep dive on a business topic,' she said. Katie Burke, the chief people officer at HubSpot, said she does a Loom video for her team every Friday.